William H Macy: ‘I’m scared and horny like a 14-year-old-boy’

Having fallen out of love with acting, the film veteran has made his directorial debut with Rudderless, a drama about a middle-aged man performing his dead son’s songs. He talks about bad directors, Uma Thurman’s back flips and rediscovering his passion for the movies

William H Macy: ‘Democracy is the kiss of death on a film set.’ Photograph: Jeff Vespa

Rudderless, the new film from William H Macy, is a tale of turnabouts, second chances and the fork in the road that points to a whole new career. Ostensibly, it’s about a washed-up businessman who unearths his dead son’s lyrics and starts playing haunted folk songs at an open-mic session. But it is also obliquely about Macy himself, a mainstay of American cinema who has just directed his first major motion picture at the age of 64.

It’s morning in LA, early evening in London, and the phone line crackles across 5,500 miles. “I’m on the coffee and you’re on the wine,” Macy announces by way of introduction. He jokes that he requires whatever fuel he can find. Time’s not on his side and directing is a slog. His first few days on the set felt like the longest of his life.

“The actor’s purview goes down to seconds,” he explains. “We concentrate intensely for maybe three minutes tops. But directing a film for 12-14 hours a day is exhausting. The two disciplines are completely different. It’s more akin to invading Normandy than painting a nice little picture.”

Over the past two decades we have watched him as tragic Donnie Smith in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, as decent Father Brendan in The Sessions and (perhaps most memorably) as the spluttering, squealing Jerry Lundegaard in the Coen brothers’ Fargo. Macy has described himself as “a sort of Everyman”, although I prefer to see him as a badge of quality; a reliable anchor for any picture, no matter how harried or hysterical the script calls on him to be. I’m not sure I would ever grow bored of seeing Macy on screen. Instead, it transpires the man was falling out of love with himself.

Acting, he insists, is not a good business to grow old in. “My career is what it is, but I felt that I’d exhausted the fun in acting. I still get a good role every once in a while, but a lot of it is yeoman work. I’m usually being called on to play somebody’s uncle, or the elderly senator. And that’s fine, it’s money. But it’s not that scintillating any more.”

Scripted by Jeff Robison and Casey Twenter, Rudderless stars Billy Crudup as the middle-aged Sam, who claims he is “too old to be in a band” and then winds up as its frontman. Along the way, old wounds are reopened, skeletons rattled and the past laid to rest. At times the screenplay struggles to reconcile its volatile material (a college massacre and its collateral damage) with Sam’s soft, shambling redemptive journey. But the handling is easy and confident, as though it’s been made by a veteran. One might even argue that it has. Macy, after all, boasts more than 100 screen credits on his CV. The day job has prepped him for his late change of gear.

Macy explains that he has worked with both good and bad directors, and has learned as much from one as he has from the other.

“Bad directors can’t make a decision,” he says. “They want the film set to function as a democracy, but a democracy is the kiss of death. You need a benign dictatorship. You need a leader.”

What else? “Bad directors ask you for more and more takes with no discernible goal in mind. Bad directors leave the stars alone and direct the smaller actors into a coma. They’re intimidated by the stars so they think: ‘Who can I tell what to do?’ I’ve seen directors take a child actor who was perfect in take one and make them do the scene again and again until the kid totally sucks. It’s hard not to step in when you see that shit happening.”

But that’s the thing about acting. You’re a cog in the machine. You perform your scenes and then you sit in the trailer. You can never be sure how the finished film will turn out. “Uma Thurman tells a great story about when she was shooting Kill Bill. The script called for her to make a standing backflip off a table. So she hired a trainer and worked at it for months. Then she sat in the cinema to watch the movie. Tarantino showed a closeup on her face and then a shot of her feet. He hired a body double to do everything else.” Macy cackles. “She wanted to kill him.”

Directing, on balance, is a far better gig. He figures that in beginning so late, he will finish stronger than most. “We all know directors who, having done the most brilliant work early in their career, eventually start to flag and get worse,” he says. “They lose touch with the world and work in a vacuum. But because I’m starting in my 60s, I’m approaching it with a humility I wouldn’t otherwise have had. On the one hand, I’m scared half to death, which means that I listen to people. And on the other, it’s as though I’ve fallen in love with the business all over again.”

He cackles and crackles down the long-distance phone line. “So I’m scared and I’m horny. I’m like a 14-year-old boy.”